


The Way You Talk to Me is Home

by spuffyduds



Category: due South
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-22
Updated: 2010-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-06 13:56:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spuffyduds/pseuds/spuffyduds





	The Way You Talk to Me is Home

When Stella kicks him out Ray feels like he's losing everything, but it doesn't even occur to him at first that he's losing a _country_.

He figures it out pretty quick, though, when he looks around his crappy new apartment and gets this feeling in his stomach that's weird but kinda--familiar.

He thinks about it for a while, thinks and drinks, and then remembers. He was five or so, at a corner grocery with his mom, and he spotted this funky one-eyed cat out on the sidewalk and slipped out the door while his mom was chatting with the grocer. The scraggly cat acted like it thought it was a _tiger_, giving all the passing people and dogs a "Yeah, you wanna start something?" look with its one eye. Ray followed the cat for a while, just enjoying its badass attitude (and muttering "badass" under his breath, because he could not get away with that at home) and then it suddenly dove down an open grate and disappeared, and Ray looked around and--he was in another country.

There were weird things hanging in the windows of the shops, some of them weird dead things, and all the stores had writing on them that didn't make any sense, and a man walked up to Ray and just a bunch of crazy _sounds_ came out of his mouth, not words, and Ray started screaming.

All of a sudden there was a cop there, and Ray was so relieved he cried a little because _son if you're ever lost look for a cop_ and the cop was talking to Ray in regular words, and talking to the guy who'd spoken to Ray in those weird sounds. Ray snuffled his nose on his sleeve and told the cop where his mom was shopping.

Before long Ray's mom showed up, cried, swatted his butt, hugged him and cried some more. It turned out he'd only gone about four blocks but he'd ended up in Chinatown.

His mom didn't let him out of her sight for _weeks_, but he didn't really _want_ her to, because he kept remembering that feeling of everything he knew being suddenly gone, of everything that was _here_ now scaring the hell out of him.

Now he looks around at this apartment, this cheap-ass "Hi, I am obviously the place of a newly separated guy" apartment, with the one armchair and the tv with tinfoil on the antenna and nothing in the kitchen cabinets but one dented pan and thirty-seven packets of Top Ramen. There's no loveseat with the side he likes and the side she likes, no ratty ugly avocado-and-orange afghan that they kept because Stella's grandmother crocheted it, no smell of something Stella was cooking for him or something he picked up at the Italian place for her, no smell of Stella. Everything's wrong and new and different and foreign and _wrong_, Ray got kicked out of the country of Ray-and-Stella and he doesn't know how to live anyplace else and he knows now, he _knows_, he saw it in her sad tired look during that last fight, he knows he's lost his passport, he can never go home.

*********************

It gets a little better, as the months go by. Most of the time he's just kind of numb instead of lost. Every now and then, though, something reminds him, like one time when he's talking over a case with his partner Campbell. Who is kind of an asshole and they've never really clicked. So Ray gets excited when they're flipping through statements in this one case that's just been making no sense, and all of a sudden things fall into place and it's obvious, it's neon-sign obvious who did it, and Ray yells, "_Daughter_-in-law!" and Campbell yells, "Daughter-in-law!" at the exact same _time_. Ray's grinning and Campbell's grinning and wham, zing, they're in the groove, they're really partners all of a sudden and Ray blows it by blurting out "Crunchy grass!"

"What?" Campbell says.

"It's just," Ray says, and he's a fucking idiot and he can feel himself turning red. "It's just this thing we used to say, my, uh, ex and me, after whenever we said something at the same time. Because. Because we both stepped onto the lawn at her parents' place at the same time, and it was the first frost of the fall that morning, and we were surprised, and we both said... So, yeah, it just means saying something at the same time."

"Right," Campbell says, and he's stopped grinning, he's gone back to his usual "My partner is a fucking freak," expression.

"Yeah," Ray says. "Let's go pick up the daughter-in-law."

You lose a country, you lose a language.

***********************

Ray didn't tell Fraser this, but one reason he said yes to the Vecchio gig was _because_ Fraser was Canadian, because Fraser'd gotten sort of kicked out of _his_ country. Ray figured maybe they could get along okay as fellow refugees.

And they do. Things get better for Ray, slowly, at work. He gets _used_ to Fraser; Fraser is something familiar to come back to every day, he's a place Ray is supposed to be. Sometimes they blurt out the same sudden brain-leap on a case, and Ray grins and Fraser grins and Ray doesn't say anything stupid.

Ray's starting to get Fraserlanguage, too. How the Inuit stories sometimes mean, "I honestly think there's a moral that applies to the current situation," and sometimes mean, "I am homesick and want to hear things that remind me of Canada, even if I have to say them myself" and sometimes mean, "I have discovered that if I am boring enough, people I don't like eventually stop trying to talk to me."

He has a harder time with Fraser's occasional French, because Ray spent most of his high-school French classes drawing air battles in his notebook and whispering "ack-ack" noises. But after Ray's known the guy a while he figures out that Fraser's not one of those "You should _know_ that already" snobs, he's always glad to translate.

Once they're at the cop bar after work with all the guys and Welsh starts going on about all the officers who _used_ to work at the 2-7. Crazy Quarterman and genius Glover and "Three Legs" Simon. (Ray's always been afraid to ask about _that_ one.) Lots of stories, raunchier and funnier with every beer Welsh downs.

Fraser nurses his ginger ale for a while, then leans and murmurs in Ray's ear (which kind of tickles) "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?" Ray gets him to translate that and then he has to get him to _explain_ it, because, seriously, what has _snow_ got to do with anything?

*********************

Eventually Ray starts having Fraser over to his place after work a lot--not like either of them has much else going on. He buys a sofa, because you can't really have guests with one armchair, and he gets a big ugly fake-fur pillow because Dief gets pissy if he has to lie on the bare floor.

One night after a really long, really exhausting shift, Fraser's over. Ray's got pizza on the way and he looks through his cabinets for the least chipped mug and digs out that box of the tea that Fraser likes so much, that smells like bacon and sweatsocks. It hits him suddenly how weird it is that he has stuff in his kitchen that he doesn't even _like_. That hasn't happened since--Stella's cottage cheese, probably.

He cracks open a beer for himself, makes the tea and carries it over to the table. Sets it in front of Fraser who's got his head tilted back against his chair, eyes closed. Ray's still feeling a little--unsettled, strange, about the tea thing, but Fraser opens his eyes, cups his hands around the mug and looks--comforted, happy maybe, and the strange feeling passes.

Ray can tell it's one of those nights when neither of them wants to say _anything_ about the job, so he tells this long rambly story about his nutjob great-uncle Manny and Manny's Plymouth Horizon that came out of the factory suicidal and wanted to take every passenger it ever had _with_ it, and Fraser comes back with one about his dad and Frobisher and three trapeze artists and a dancing bear with vertigo.

Ray laughs and takes a swig of beer and says, "Where's all the fucking snow gone, huh?"

Fraser blinks at him and then says, "Exactly, Ray. _Exactly_," and smiles.

 

\--END--


End file.
